One month ago American Eagle launched its controversial ad campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney. It remains a hot topic on the internet. Sweeney has been a popular subject for celeb-related gossip for some time, from rumors of an affair with Glenn Powell of romcom Anyone But You to recent back-to-back box office bombs. She’s been threatening over-exposure for a while, and now appears to have reached the tipping point. I feel like every time I open an app I get a jeans jumpscare. In one snippet, with all the energy of a sloth on valium, Sweeney saunters around denim-clad, the camera zeroing in particularly on her behind as she admires herself in a mirror. “This is not me telling you to buy American Eagle jeans,” she tells the camera, before the slogan SYDNEY SWEENEY HAS GREAT JEANS splashes itself across the screen. In another, she mumbles her way through some boring gene factoids while buttoning up the fly and then schmoozes at the camera.
A few years ago, I was very much expecting her to climb to the ranks of the Silver Screen Gen Z Brat Pack. I didn’t predict her having quite the clout as Zendaya, Timothee Chalamet, etc, but I was expecting her to hover on the periphery of the group. Even with Euphoria season two exposing the show’s style-over-substance problem, she did her best with the material she was given,. It sounds strange, but Sweeney can really nail a whimpering, cowardly mess. She’s also appeared in other prestige shows such as Sharp Objects, The White Lotus, and The Handmaid’s Tale, and she’s given solid, commendable performances. Obviously I’m no publicist or public relations manager, but I would’ve advised her to choose commercial work carefully and sparingly. Instead, she’s been taking what seems like every brand opportunity that comes her way; she’s defended the choice because it helped her to buy a house. Now she owns a 13.5 million compound in Florida. But still. A quick google search estimates that Sweeney gets paid 800k per Euphoria episode, and I imagine her other acting gigs pay pretty well..
On one hand, the ad doesn’t seem very good. I’m no Don Draper, but I think I could’ve put something a touch more coherent together. As a woman, it just doesn’t make me want to buy the jeans. Sweeney is undoubtedly beautiful, but the garments look ill-fitting and uninteresting. The flat affect she adopts inspires absolutely no enthusiasm from me, and kind of undermines the sultry sexpot thing she tries to sell. Compare her to Sabrina Carpenter, the other blonde bombshell of the hour. Carpenter is campy and coquettish, there is a slyness, a wink and a nudge. Sweeney seems to try to emulate this, and at least for me, it very rarely lands.
On the other hand, the entire point of an ad is to attract attention, and American Eagle certainly did that. Companies harness outrage culture by purposefully incorporating problematic slants that can technically be hand-waved away after the fact. Do I think that the original idea of “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans/genes” was proffered with only the intention to allude to her figure? Yes. Do I also think that as they bandied ideas about, they considered the fact that it could be interpreted as promoting white supremacy? Absolutely. I just can’t fathom a room of professionals in marketing not considering that would be the case. They knew how it could be picked up, and they decided to go with it anyways.But if we decide to look the other way, and not critique for the sake of drawing attention to unsavory practices, surely they’ll just continue. And a company making the choice to imply eugenics in our current political climate for the sake of cashing in on disarray is something that shouldn’t be ignored.
Matters haven’t been helped by the fact that Sweeney has since been revealed as a Republican. Pop culture aficionados will know that she’s been a suspected MAGA-head since 2023, when pictures from her mother’s sixtieth hoedown birthday party surfaced. Attendees wore Make Sixty Great Again hats and Blue Lives Matter t-shirts. Sweeney pushed back against the reaction, insisting that the party was innocent fun and not politically charged.
But the Republican bombshell was dropped, and she’s made no moves to distance herself from the right. Trump has given Sweeney a glowing review online, saying, “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the “HOTTEST” ad out there. It’s for American Eagle, and the jeans are flying off the shelves”. That much is true: a number of the products sold out in record time, presumably due to swathes of conservatives reacting to what they see as a liberal tantrum. Trump keeps petty celebrity drama in his mouth and uses it to muddy other conversations: it’s a ploy to have the discord reach such a crescendo that everyone drops out of it, exhausted and unmotivated to continue fighting.
I also only recently found out that one of the designs had a butterfly logo on it, intended to bring awareness to domestic violence awareness, with all of the proceeds going towards Crisis Text Line. A very worthy cause, and I am delighted they are receiving funds from the campaign. But if bringing awareness to the charity was another aim, they categorically failed. The bizarre optics, the sexually charged angles, the clumsy tagline, the lack of pretty much any narrative other than “Sydney Sweeney is hot!!!!!”, none of that recipe has any link to domestic abuse. And I also find it fundamentally strange and tasteless for a campaign intending to spotlight abuse made to appeal to the male gaze, and using a fifteen-year-old as a reference.
The ad was a clear throwback to Brooke Shields’ 1980 Calvin Klein jeans campaign, a troubling touchpoint Controversial even when it was aired, it’s been recontextualized as even more disturbing. Shields’ admitted in documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields that she hadn’t understood the double entendres peppered throughout the campaign. Shields was hideously exploited as a child. Her sexualization and objectification was a twisted thing that was carried out in the public sphere. The Calvin Klein campaign was technically iconic, but was unforgivable manipulation of a minor. I believe American Eagle were aware of their sparking a eugenics row, I imagine they were equally prepared for this element of the ads to spark backlash. They chose indignation and scandal over sensitive and structured storytelling. It was lazy, it was a stunt. Unfortunately conservative rhetoric is alive and well and companies will profit if they court Republican favor. I guess you could still say it’s a net positive, because the chatter surrounding the ad drove sales, but referencing a minor’s erotic ad campaign while attempting to support domestic abuse charities seems to require the same amount of cognitive dissonance that casting scientologist Elizabeth Moss as the protagonist of The Handmaid’s Tale did.
Of course, when making judgement on a famous woman being sexualized, you always run the risk of being accused of shaming her for her sexuality. We saw the aforementioned Sabrina Carpenter receive backlash when the cover of her next album, Man’s Best Friend, was unveiled. In it, Carpenter crawls on the ground, a faceless man’s hand gripped in her signature curls. It prompted so much discourse that there was discourse about the discourse. One side found the cover debasing, reminiscent of abusive pornography, and utterly unempowering. Another crowd insisted that Carpenter was entitled to express her sexuality however she saw fit, and that the cover was obviously tongue-in-cheek. Commenters acknowledged Carpenter’s business savvy and her intention to make controversial waves i. ButCarpenter usually manages to wriggle out of things by being charismatic and much more clued-in than you’d expect.
But I don’t think it can be denied that it was made to show off every contour of Sweeney’s body in a highly voyeuristic manner. You can make sexy content that appeals to women, but Sweeney feels like she has no agency in the videos; she is just a monotone Barbie doll, wriggling in and out of denim and smouldering lazily at the camera. This was made for men, and we’re seeing more and more content like that. The Girl Boss feminism of the mid 2010s, was cringe but well-intentioned.
This flat, drawling, sexed-up act from Sweeney has been on our screens before. In June, Sweeney collaborated with Dr. Squatch Soap to produce a bar using her bathwater as one of its ingredients. Yes, you read that right. “Hello, you dirty little boys,” she says unenthusiastically from a bubble bath. “Are you interested in my body…wash?” Again, the campaign was effective: the product sold out. It seems she’s embraced centering men. Most people found the launch of the soap pathetically cringe and cheapening her brand, but a few optimists supported her for securing the bag by taking advantage of the guys who creep on her online. Some try to argue that by sexualizing themselves, Sweeney and Carpenter are getting there before the male gaze does; they are liberated by embracing their sexuality. But then, is it really a choice, when it’s made in a vacuum? And does the male gaze need to be centered so aggressively? Are they taking ownership of their desires and expressing agency or simply surrendering to the patriarchal status quo that they could be challenging?
Jo Ellison wrote a piece for the Financial Times offering up another viewpoint: that our preoccupation with Sweeney is a reflection of our own issues, and not hers. Comparing her to Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield Ellison points out that we choose to politicize Sweeney because she has natural assets. Ellison states “for a huge swath of the population a pneumatic blonde still embodies the ideal of womanhood”. I understand her point, and it was nice to have a differing perspective. I don’t quite think Sweeney is interesting enough to garner such a defence, but I partially agree. Putting Sweeney herself at the center of our critiques, and levelling all the criticism on her, is not conducive to change or a solution to media storms. Plus, people really are always far too eager to jump on a famous woman and pummel her down to a splinter. The issue really lies at the feet of large brands using strife to make sales, and governments that are propelling forward a movement that values white supremacy, female subjugation, and outdated ideals.
